Seiler: Two dads, three sons, upstaters

Casey Seiler

Published 7:22 pm, Saturday, June 16, 2012

There's time, and there's geography.

For the former, consider that my father recently celebrated the 55th anniversary of his graduation from Cornell University. For the latter, consider how escorting him to Ithaca reminded me that I've lived in upstate New York for more years than I've lived anywhere else.

My 12-year-old son, who also came along on the trip, has never lived anywhere else.

In contrast, by the time I was that age, my family had lived in Buffalo and West Virginia before coming to ground in Kentucky. Along the way, I came to think of myself as a resident of American Suburbia, South-Midwest Sector, a comfy but largely ahistorical land of recently built homes on winding streets in developments with names like Hunting Creek and Fox Harbor.

My son, however, was barely able to walk when we moved into the house in Albany where we still live. He plays with some of the same children he first met in preschool. The terrain of local parks and ball fields is stamped into his mind much more deeply than my own hazy memories of boyhood.

To get to Ithaca, we pulled out from in front of my house and made a left on Western Avenue. If you stay on that road for about 300 miles and then take a series of right turns, you'll arrive at the house in Williamsville where I learned to walk.

In Cooperstown, we had lunch with a friend of my father's from high school, a retired banker who took us to a lakeside restaurant where the speciality was a deep-fried, bacon-and-cheese-wrapped hot dog. (I hope I'm still ordering such things in my late 70s — if they haven't been outlawed.)

He and my father had been catcher and pitcher during the Eisenhower administration, and despite my father's protests ("I don't think he ever caught a pitch, from all the hits they would get off me") this gentleman assured my son that his grandfather had been more than able on the mound.

A few hours later, we arrived at a small inn on Cayuga Lake to find that several of my father's fraternity brothers and their wives had already arrived. The group sat on the porch and drank wine and beer — ginger ale for my son — as others drove in, eliciting shouts and the sort of light horseplay that you can still get away with in your 70s. One member of the group uses a walker to get around, but his mind remains sharp.

At dinner, the conversation ranged from shared exploits from a half-century ago to what they had been up to last month. Absent friends were ailing, others had recently passed away — but there was far more laughter than loss.

My father's father also graduated from Cornell. The next day on campus, we looked for his name among those etched on the walls of one of the university's scholarly societies before realizing it was a memorial for students lost in World War I. If his name had been inscribed there, none of us would have been around to read it.

My grandfather, who like his sons made a career in retail, would go on to spend more of his life in New York. When I was small, winter included visits to my grandparents' apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, summer brought extended stays at their vacation cottage in the Catskills.

My cousins, roughly a decade older than me and my siblings, have richer memories of my grandfather from the years before his decades of smoking caught up to him. To me, he was always a kind but fairly distant person, someone who I couldn't ever imagine as a young man, much less as a child. My son's memories will be different.

So you can say I've already gotten the best Father's Day gift I could ask for: time with the man on one side of my life and the boy on the other, in the state we all call home.

Because in the end, time and geography — plus each other — is all we have.